ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Empathy and personality traits as predictors of adjustment in Indian youth A bstract Yashwant K. Nagle, Kalpna Anand Defence Institute of Psychological Research, Defence Research and Development Organization, Delhi, India
Address for correspondence: Dr. Yashwant K. Nagle, Defence Institute of Psychological Research, Defence Research and Development Organization, Lucknow Road, Timarpur, Delhi, India. E‑mail:
[email protected]
Background: Although adjustment has been studied in relation with a host of variables, the relevance of empathy and its importance in the process of adjustment has received little attention. It is a well‑known fact that personality plays a very important role in our interactions and dealings and also that empathy facilitates this process. Settings and Design: This study evaluated whether these two things combined together affect or predict adjustment. A random sample of 52 young male adults volunteered for this study. Materials and Methods: These 52 male participants filled up questionnaires related to personality (The Jackson Personality Inventory), empathy. The Empathy Quotient) and adjustment (Bell adjustment inventory). Analysis and Results: The data were analyzed using correlation and regression analysis. Personality traits like interpersonal affect, conformity facilitated the process of adjustment, whereas traits like anxiety worked in the opposite direction. Empathy also emerged as a significant contributor to the social adjustment. Conclusions: Results showed that both empathy and personality traits accounted for unique variance in adjustment. Results are discussed in terms of empathy, personality traits and their role in adjustment. Keywords: Adjustment, empathy, Indian youth
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ising incidents of delinquency and crime show that the adjustment of present‑day youth is on a downward drift. Emotional disturbances and interpersonal problems that our youth is facing these days are on rise.[1] Increase in depression, suicidal rates, drug use is the clear indication of the challenges of present‑day adolescents. Use of heavy drugs and youth dropouts has also increased in the recent years.[2]
serves as a learned lesson and as an inhibitor of further aggressive acts to a child who vicariously experienced pain through another child’s experience.[7,8] It is widely believed that empathy encourages prosocial or altruistic behavior and numerous studies appear to support this view. It has also been proposed that a lack of empathy encourages aggressive or antisocial behavior, as such actions might be facilitated in those who fail to appreciate the feelings of other.[9]
Empathy is defines as ‘the ability to put oneself into the mental shoes of another person to understand her emotions and feelings’.[3] Empathy is the ability to understand emotions, accurately express feelings, comprehend others’ situations and act appropriately. It is one of the key factors in establishing healthy relationships. Empathy plays a crucial role in the development of behavior,[4‑6] which in turn helps inhibit aggression toward others. Empathy facilitates positive psychological development and healthy relationships, as well as restrains aggression. Empathy
Personality of an individual is assessed by the effectiveness with which he or she is able to elicit positive reactions from a variety of person’s under different circumstances. It is also considered to elicit salient impression on others. Personality permits a prediction of ‘what a person will do in a given situation’. Personality trait attributions are often adequate to explain ‘events’ for many everyday purposes in common‑sense psychology.[10] Personality traits are the ultimate realities and psychological organization.[11] Review of research also indicated prior research pertaining to the role of personality as predictors of adjustment. However the role of empathy warrants a special attention. This study was undertaken with an aim to investigate the role of empathy and personality traits as predictors of adjustment. This endeavor is likely to be beneficial to the society in promoting empathy for better adjustment and psychological well being of young adults.
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DOI: 10.4103/0972-6748.119608
Industrial Psychiatry Journal
125
Jul-Dec 2012 | Vol 21 | Issue 2
Nagle and Anand: Empathy, personality and adjustment
Personality
Materials and Methods
The Jackson personality inventory (JPI) is widely considered to be one of the most psychometrically sound measures of personality.[13] The JPI‑R provides valid and reliable insight into an individual’s personality and ability to function in a wide range of settings from work, organizational, leadership and social situations. In one convenient form, the JPI provides a measure of personality consisting of 16 subscales that reflect a variety of social, cognitive and value orientations, which affect an individual’s functioning. It has 320 items that have two response options: True or False. Reliability as median internal consistency (Bentler’s theta) were 0.90 and 0.93 and item‑total correlations indicate that items correlate higher on average with their own scale’s total score than they do with the total score on any of the other 14 scales. Correlations between the JPI‑R and several well‑known measures of personality provide evidence of convergent and discriminate validity.
Sample
Table 1 shows that the sample consisted of 52 young male adults (17-22 years) from southern and central part of India who volunteered for the study involving ‘empathy, adjustment and personality’. Participants’ mean age was 18.12 years (SD=0.74), and 45% were in senior secondary school and 55% were pursuing graduation at Bhopal (Central India) and Bangalore (South India). The sample consisted of middle‑class young adults from urban and semiurban areas. The main inclusion criteria were higher secondary education level. Family psychopathology and psychiatric problems were ruled out. Tools Empathy
The empathy quotient (EQ) that is a self‑administered forced choice scale comprising of 60 items, 40 assessing empathizing and 20 filler items. Approximately, half the items are worded to produce a ‘disagree’ response and half ‘agree’ response. The items are randomized to avoid a response bias.[12] The scale has been used in Indian studies. The internal consistency of the Empathy quotient, measured by Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was 0.78. The test retest reliability was good as measured by Pearson’s r correlation coefficient was r=0.84 (P
